Periphery, page 15
“Will we ever see you again?”
His father moved out of Andrew’s line of sight, but he could track his progress around the bed and toward the closet by the sound of his voice.
“I’m not going far. Just across town. I’m moving out of the house, not out of you and Andy’s lives. We’ll keep in touch, and I think he’s starting to come out of it…”
Andrew clutched the bat tighter. The room beyond the closet was an expanding sliver of white.
“Andy? Andy, can you hear me?”
Even his father’s voice was different now. It had acquired a reedy, southern twang. The sliver of white continued to expand. Andrew tried to pull the bat back for a stronger swing, but it must have gotten entangled in hangars because he couldn’t move it, not upward or backward or forward. It was stuck, as was Andrew, immobilized in the expanding column of light.
“I don’t think we’ll need those, Clare. He’s coming to now.”
Andrew’s back was pressed against the far wall of the closet, but somehow the closet had rotated. The wall was under him and it was cold and white and there were feet sprouting from it. Feet and legs. And beyond those the legs of chairs.
“Andy.”
“What happened?” He tried to push himself up, but was restrained by a hand on his chest.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let’s just take this slowly. You may have hit your head when you went down. I want to check you first.”
Gary flashed a penlight in his eyes.
“I fainted?”
“We were on our way to the kitchen. Follow the tip of my finger with your eyes.”
“I remember.”
“I didn’t see what happened, but Clare said you suddenly clutched your head and went down.”
“Looked like you heard something agonizing,” she offered. “You covered your ears and just kind of … swooned.”
“How long have I been out?”
“ ’Bout a minute.” Gary’s fingers fluttered over the back of his skull, finding the lump from his previous fall with Anna in the parking lot.
“Looks like you did hit your head.”
“No. That’s from a few days ago. My head’s fine.”
“Debatable,” Sid quipped, and Hamilton fired back, “Can it, lieutenant.” Was the entire station gathered around him?
“Help me sit up.”
Gary eased him into a sitting position, but continued his examination. “Just being thorough.”
“How you feeling, Andy?” Hamilton asked.
“Better, captain. Not sure what happened there.” Although he did know. The vetro had bellowed a killing command and the world had flared white.
“Here. Something to sip.” Clare was at his side, a bottle of water in one hand.
“I’m fine,” he said, but accepted the water with a grateful nod.
“Slowly,” she advised. “You know, this may sound crazy, but I swear I heard something at the exact instant you grabbed your head, like voices echoing from the other end of a long metal pipe. Crazy, huh?”
“I don’t know,” Terrance said. “Might have noticed something myself. Not a voice. Nothing like that. More a change in air pressure, a sudden whistle and then a whooshing.”
“Help me up.”
With Gary on his left and Clare on the right, Andrew regained his feet. A moment of gray vertigo passed quickly. He pointed to the common room couch and moved toward it, shedding the hands offered to steady him. When he reached the couch he sank into it, feigning the businesslike sniff of someone relishing a moment of calm between customary bursts of activity.
“Sorry for the drama. I’m fine. Probably just dehydrated.” He took another gulp of water to reinforce the point. “Is that necessary?” Gary positioned the portable EEG next to him and placed the leads on his shin and chest.
“You already know,” he said.
“Heart’s fine.” He didn’t realize Clare was next to him until she pricked his finger. “Blood sugar’s fine, too. I told you, I’m just dehydrated. It’s the heat.”
“Sure, sure,” Hamilton agreed, a little too quickly. “Been hard on everyone. This just re-emphasizes what I’ve been saying for months: you can’t take care of someone else if you don’t take care of yourself first. It’s easy to overexert in these conditions. None of us are superhuman.”
Andrew gave him a thumbs-up but noticed Terrance’s head angle toward Sid as he muttered something under his breath. Let them whisper. He had bigger things to worry about. But sitting here with all eyes upon him was an intolerable situation and his gaze drifted about the room, avoiding other faces as he mentally scrambled for anything he could say to shift their attention elsewhere.
Out of habit, Andrew glanced up at the television mounted on the opposite wall and leaned forward on the couch.
“Could someone turn that up?” he said, pointing.
Terrance plucked the remote off the table and increased the volume as the other firefighters, to Andrew’s tremendous relief, turned and watched.
“…hampering firefighter’s efforts to contain the blaze.” The camera pulled back from a tight shot of a wall of flame to reveal a line of dusty Department of Forestry firefighter’s digging breaks through the kindling dry brush. The dust rising from the ground and the smoke from the fire seemed to combine in a choking fog, and Andrew took another sip of water as his throat closed in sympathy.
The news report switched to a head-and-shoulders shot of a woman standing before a glass wall etched with the logo of the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Department.
“Sheriff’s spokesperson Annette Fitzpatrick says there are currently no plans for either voluntarily or mandatory evacuations, although nothing is being ruled out.”
“Obviously, we are carefully watching the situation and are constantly re-evaluating the threat level. Lots of people are working very hard to contain the fire, but as you all know, we’re in the middle of an unprecedented drought. Our advice is the same as it would be if we were under a hurricane warning: be prepared and stay informed. If evacuation orders become necessary, we don’t want to have to go door-to-door telling people to get out.”
The report switched to an aerial shot of the fire, Tampa’s skyline an irregular collection of blue-gray blocks on the hazy horizon.
“Officials say the wildfire has burned three thousand acres to date and is less than two percent contained.”
“Three thousand?” Andrew said. “This morning it was only one. Can a wildfire burn through two thousand acres in a single afternoon?”
Hamilton shook his head. “Maybe my intel was outdated. A thousand was the figure they gave me and that’s what I passed on to you. No use worrying about it. If they lose containment, we’ll be the first to know.”
Andrew slapped his thighs and stood. “I’m ready for lunch. Ziti, right?” The thought of food turned a sour fist in his stomach, but he had to rebuild an aura of normalcy with his fellow firefighters, something he’d been struggling with even before the vetro’s howl. His thoughts circled back to the box of cervical collars now sitting on a shelf in the station’s storage room.
The fainting spell might have actually done him some good, providing a momentary break to his fretting over whether or not the Trenchrite would be discovered before he could secrete it from the building. There was no use obsessing about it. All he could do until his shift ended the next morning was act as if everything was fine. It shouldn’t be that hard. He had plenty of practice with deception. And although others would probably disagree, Andrew had come to believe he had at least a small talent for feigning normal.
The circle of bubbling metal continued to expand, a sizzling, smoking corrosion that would soon chew its way through the door. To John, it resembled a brown stain soaking into a paper towel, a puddle of old blood absorbed by a gray mesh of disintegrating fibers.
The smoke was thick, greasy, yellow. It sank and accumulated in a vaporous mat, creeping across the floor. Even if the door somehow withstood the onslaught, death from smoke inhalation appeared a real possibility.
Instead of panic, however, a profound calm was settling over him like a caul, slick and membranous. The things on the other side of the door were not the vetro offalate, only their vermin. As such, they could do nothing more than kill them, a fate far kinder than what their masters would do upon arrival. Death: an end to worrying. An end of guilt. To finally, finally be able to let it all slip away and sink into the peace of oblivion. No, there were worse things than death, even death beneath the claws, teeth, talons, barbs of the bilantu.
“Let them come.”
John turned to his right. Emily’s head was resting against the shelf behind them, her eyes nearly shut. “Let them come,” she repeated in a syrupy sigh as her head lolled toward his shoulder. On his left, Hector was no longer pointing his gun at the door. His hand rested in his lap. The officer’s finger was still within the trigger guard, but his grip had relaxed to such an extent that the handle had slipped from his palm.
Something bucked beneath John’s sternum and he shuddered. There was spittle at the corner of his mouth. He wiped it away and with a monumental effort staggered to his feet. As soon as his head was elevated, the fugue began to dissipate.
“Get up. Get up!”
He reached down and grabbed Emily’s left arm. The limb rose languidly in his grip, but she made no effort to follow it.
“We’re being gassed. There must be a neurotoxin in the smoke. Get up, damn it!”
He redoubled his efforts and managed to lift Emily a foot off the ground. Her legs wobbled under her and for a moment the two swayed in a teetering waltz. Bent over as he was, with his head near the floor, John’s will to fight ebbed once more. Emily took a groggy swipe at him and he let her go.
“The point? We’re going to die no matter what.”
“Maybe,” he said, straightening to gulp the fresher air above. “But I’m not going down without a fight.”
“Me either.” Hector was inching slowly upwards, sweeping boxes and bottles off the shelf behind him as his hands sought purchase. “I didn’t drag myself out of a Mixco slum to die in a supply closet. Fuck that shit.”
John held his breath, grabbed Hector under his armpits and lifted him to his feet. The correctional officer stood with closed lids, breathing deeply for three or four inhalations. His left shirt sleeve was tacky with blood, but the flow didn’t seem substantial. It appeared the bullet had only grazed the muscle.
“Better,” he said as his eyes fluttered open.
“Help me with her, but hold your breath.”
Hector holstered his gun and together he and John managed to pull Emily to her feet. The yellow fog had spread to cover the entire floor, so thick their feet were invisible beneath. John thought he felt his skin beginning to prickle and lifted a foot to reassure himself his jail-issued slip-ons weren’t canvas rags dangling from blistered flesh.
“Shoot whatever comes through,” he said, scanning the shelves for anything that could be used as a weapon.
“Count on it.”
“Do they keep scalpels in here? Bone saws? Anything like that?”
Emily snorted. “Bone saws? No. No cranial drills either before you ask. We’ve got scalpel blades in one of these boxes, scalpel handles in another, but it would take me a few minutes to find and assemble them, and I don’t think we have that long.”
The metal within the expanding circle of corrosion was boiling wildly, ribbons of steel curling off the surface in dark petals that fell, hissing, into the rising fog below.
“Here,” she pulled something long and slender off a high shelf and handed it to him. “This is the best I can do.”
John hefted the crutch, trying to gauge its balance. Emily grabbed one for herself and when their eyes met, both smiled.
“Ain’t we a couple of warriors,” she said.
“Give me a target, Brutrelli.” Hector’s gun was again pointed at the door. There was no tremor in his grip. “Stick your face right in the center of the hole.”
Something in the infirmary bellowed, and with a dull boom the circled of degraded metal flew inward as if punched. The first thing to appear in the resulting space was not, however, Brutrelli’s head. It was a bristled tarsus hooking itself to the lip of the opening.
“Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes,” John advised. A second tarsus joined the first, followed by the flutter of antennae.
“They even have eyes?” Hector asked.
“Quite a few.”
In a blur of motion, something came hurling through the opening with beating wings. Hector shot it from the air, the sound of the gun deafening in the enclosed space. John darted forward and brought the crutch pad down on the shape thrashing in the yellow fog. There was a crunch of exoskeleton, felt rather than heard, a spurt of viscous ichor, what might have been a squeal. He managed a second blow before Hector fired again.
John couldn’t make out what was sagging through the opening this time. It appeared an amalgamation of several bilantu, as if an apperix, malta and quintaloch had fused into a single creature. A maw rimmed with needlelike teeth dilated wide and Hector put a bullet through the center. The thing spasmed but continued to ooze its way into the room, tentacles whipping like unmanned fire hoses. Two more bullets dropped it in a heap at the door’s threshold, where it continued to twitch and buck.
“How many bullets you got in that?” Emily asked.
“Eleven now.”
A form, vaguely man shaped, flitted past the opening and Hector fired another round. To John, it was a confounding riot of textures and flailing appendages, an upright heap of bilantu acting in concert. An image flashed and faded in his head with a phosphorescent phiff, a troupe of costumed Chinese acrobats assembled into a towering human mimic, lumbering across the stage in a marvel of strength and coordination. The form shrugged a segment of its shoulder through the opening, and for a fraction of a second John thought he could make out the blue of a uniform before the mass re-coalesced around it.
Jesus, could there be a man under all that?
Hector shot again. Emily darted forward and swung her crutch down. Once, twice. John could hear nothing over the roar in his ears. Each new round sounded more distant than the last. He’d lost track of the number of shots. Six now? Eight? The floor was littered with carcasses. His footing was becoming treacherous. Every time he moved forward to smash something, John's shoe came down on an irregular surface. He nearly slipped on a slick patch and would have gone down had Emily not grabbed his flailing arm. How could there be so many of them?
Pop went Hector’s gun. Pop. Pop. He was nearly deafened now. It no longer sounded as if the shots were coming from inside the closet. They seemed to issue from the infirmary or the hall beyond. Hector was shouting, but like the gunshots, his voice was a distant echo.
Pop. Pop. Pop-pop-pop-pop.
What was he shooting at? Nothing had come through the hole for several seconds. Hector’s gun, a Glock, John noted dully, was still pointed at the door. Must be hot, he thought absurdly. Pop, pop. But wait. He wasn’t firing after all. No flash came from the muzzle, no buck of recoil. John swallowed, stuffed a finger into the canal of his left ear, shook it vigorously, and swallowed again.
Pop.
The shots were coming from outside the closet, as were the shouts.
“About fucking time,” Hector said. “Calvary’s finally here.”
When John took a cautious step forward, the guard pressed a restraining hand against his chest.
“Let’s just hang back here until things settle down. Or haven’t you had enough excitement?”
John eyed the hole in the door, resisting a sudden, maddening desire to poke his head out. What had trapped them here? Man? Beast? Brutrelli? Bilantu? He wanted to know. He needed to know.
“What if they don’t get control?” Emily asked. She was clutching the crutch against her chest like a soldier presenting a rifle for inspection, the pad thick with gore. Her face was a pale oval in the glow of the single overhead bulb, bloodless lips pressed tight below dimly shining eyes.
“They will. We’re trained for this sort of thing.”
“You have got to be kidding.”
“You know what I mean. Trouble. We’re trained to react when the shit hits the fan.”
The commotion in the next room intensified with a staccato of gunfire and confused shouts. Something overturned with a metallic clang and John realized, belatedly, that an alarm was pulsing in a continuous warble. The entire facility was probably under lock-down by now.
“I hope you’re right, because the shit is most certainly hitting the fan.”
The shooting continued for what seemed an inordinately long time but was probably no more than twenty or thirty seconds. The crack of gunfire slowed from a flurry to individual rounds to a smattering of bangs punctuating increasingly lengthy breaks. John couldn’t help picturing a bag of nearly-cooked popcorn spinning slowly on a microwave turntable. A final shot rang out and for the next minute, they stood listening as the alarm droned on.
“Don’t move,” Hector said. “I’m going to check things out.”
The guard moved to the door, picking his way over the fallen bilantu as if he were high-stepping through a minefield. When he got to the hole he bent to peer out.
“Well?” Emily demanded after a moment.
The guard waved her silent. “Martin!” he called through the opening. “It’s me, Hector. You guys done? We’d like to come out without getting shot to pieces.”
Someone responded and Hector hitched a mirthless chuckle. “Yeah, tell me something I don’t know. So, can we come out or what?”
John heard nothing, but Hector gave the person on the other side of the door a thumbs-up before motioning them forward. They advanced slowly, plowing the way clear with their crutches. When they reached the front of the closet, Emily gave a nod and Hector swung the door open.
The room they stepped into was a detonation, broken furnishings, shattered glass, debris everywhere. Half the overhead fluorescents were dark. The hallway door rested at a forty-five-degree angle directly across from the smashed threshold, propped against the remains of a low bank of cabinets. Bullet-hole constellations peppered the walls, while plaster dust and gunpowder smoke hung thick in the air.
